Fun Latin Resources

[nobeatenpath]

Well I got DS to agree to go back to learning Latin - we have started it before then switched to Japanese but for various reasons a few years of Latin is going to be better overall.* So come January we are back to the start with Cambridge Latin, my aim being to take the GCSE Latin exam in a few years.

However, part of the deal was that I find some 'fun' Latin resources. Which in this house usually means iPad based games and apps :lol: We have previously worked through the Visual Latin lessons and he was doing quite well so that kind of 'quirky' approach would be a hit, but I am looking more for games than actual lessons. Bonus points if it is tied to Roman history, and extra gold stars if it can be tied to military history (of course Latin in other contexts is more than welcome).

 

 

 

*I know he could learn Latin AND Japanese but he is already having to pick up enough Turkish to get by in society here and I think asking him to learn THREE completely different foreign languages is just too much.

[Faithr]

I don't know any apps but there is a fun vocabulary game where you can also help donate rice to the hungry.  

 

There's a fun Latin blog that often posts fun tidbits of information about the Roman world or the etymology of a Latin word.  Be forewarned that sometimes it can refer to some of the racier elements of Roman culture!

 

My favorite fun Latin website is BestLatin which teaches via short proverbs, sayings and fables.  Plus funny cat posters!

 

Finally I love LatinTutorial on youtube.  He explains lots of stuff very clearly.

[Dmmetler]

Do you have the web extensions for Cambridge Latin? They add a lot-basically all those cultural things in the book are now clickable links to the British museum, Cambridge University archives, and so on. There are also some games and interactive activities. I do suggest doing the translations before going to the website, because the book text is set up so that you can click on it and it translates each word, which makes it really easy to not think about.

 

Also, my DD is doing CLC stage 4 along with Latin Prep 1 (to solidify grammar) and is delighting in adding commentary and the occasional illustration and playing with the sentences from Latin Prep, which is (as she puts it) suffering from a shortage of nouns. So, we get sentences like "The sailor loved the pretty servant girl", which DD will dutifully translate, and then add "but the girl hated that he only thought of her as pretty and didn't know she was a poet, so she loved the author instead" (all in Latin), and illustrate it with a cartoon of a girl snake with poetic language in a bubble over her head, pushing a snake wearing a sailor hat into a mud puddle. She finds Latin Prep tedious and simple-but easily spends 2-3x as long as the assignment actually would take to do straight writing commentary and illustrating, often giggling the entire time. So "fun" curriculum can be curriculum the kid makes fun for them.

[nobeatenpath]

Do you have the web extensions for Cambridge Latin? They add a lot-basically all those cultural things in the book are now clickable links to the British museum, Cambridge University archives, and so on. There are also some games and interactive activities. I do suggest doing the translations before going to the website, because the book text is set up so that you can click on it and it translates each word, which makes it really easy to not think about.

 

Also, my DD is doing CLC stage 4 along with Latin Prep 1 (to solidify grammar) and is delighting in adding commentary and the occasional illustration and playing with the sentences from Latin Prep, which is (as she puts it) suffering from a shortage of nouns. So, we get sentences like "The sailor loved the pretty servant girl", which DD will dutifully translate, and then add "but the girl hated that he only thought of her as pretty and didn't know she was a poet, so she loved the author instead" (all in Latin), and illustrate it with a cartoon of a girl snake with poetic language in a bubble over her head, pushing a snake wearing a sailor hat into a mud puddle. She finds Latin Prep tedious and simple-but easily spends 2-3x as long as the assignment actually would take to do straight writing commentary and illustrating, often giggling the entire time. So "fun" curriculum can be curriculum the kid makes fun for them.

 

All great to know - it has been a few years since we tackled Cambridge Latin so I will look in to the web stuff again (also found out the GCSE latin exam is changing too so that is more I have to look in to).

And I love the example of 'playing with the sentences' - that sounds like something my DS would love doing. Hopefully it won't take too long to get back up to speed enough to do that kind of thing.

[Dmmetler]

The web extensions are relatively inexpensive-usually under $20 USD, even after paying international currency fees, so I often suggest adding them no matter what curriculum you are using, because there is so much good history and roman culture stuff.

 

Another thing to consider is the NJCL exams-there is a National Roman Civilizations Exam which focuses on the history and culture, as well as the National Classical Etymology Exam and the National Latin Vocabulary exam. If you have a kid who likes things like this, it can be fun, and they're easy to manage since they're online (they do require a proctor who doesn't teach the child Latin-we have DD do them at the local library with the children's librarian as a proctor).